Andrew Weisberg - Week 9 Devlog

WEEK 9 (Oct 18)
Sound Design (~1 Hour)

For this week, I got to work on assembling a sound library for Spit it Out on SoundQ.  I was told not to worry too much about this aspect of the project by Grayson; he and his friend will be doing sound design work alongside me, but I think having this on-hand just in case of a snafu will help us.

As a general guideline, I believe we're looking for cartoony sound effects, things with bounce, drip, plucks...the kinds of sound effects that sound like they'd come from an anime or any cartoon, really.

So with that in mind, I picked out some basic sounds to use SoundQ.  For example, I was hoping to find cartoon footsteps right off the bat, and as it turns out, Kent's SoundQ account has a lot of foley footsteps for us to use, but nothing close to what we would want to use for Spit it Out because they're too realistic for us to use.  This didn't turn out to be that much of an issue, though; I found a really nice poking sound effect from an anime sound library that can be repurposed as footsteps.

Music Composition (~5 Hours)

I chose to focus on revamping Back 2 Basics.  Since the first rendition of the song a few weeks ago, Grayson asked for a revamp, so I threw together a small section draft to get his thoughts on.

We had some further discussion about the direction to go for, and we generally agreed that for a tutorial level, we'd stick to pads and some light pluck instruments for less of an active piece and more of a drone-like piece with accents throughout the drone.  With that in mind, I reused what I already had for the pads, got rid of percussion, and slowed down the BPM to 110.  Some extra layered pads on top, a little bit of automation work for volume, and this is what I came up with.  There was also a key change somewhere in the mix because it sounded a little too under the weather.

I generally feel pretty happy with this, and Grayson does as well.  He likens it to Minecraft music, but I'm not quite sure I see the resemblance...